Extreme Protests: Changing Protest Repertoires in Labor Movements in Korea

• In Event: Political Behaviors and Contentious Politics in Korea

Abstract

Korean labor movements have traditionally been known for their militant confrontation with employers and law enforcement forces. Labor militancy in the 1980s and 1990s was manifested in the scale of collective mobilization and in the form of labor strikes and mass demonstrations. In the last two decades, however, the frequency of these mass collective actions has subsided, while the number of extreme protest repertoires (defined as a form of protest that is lone in nature, accompanying a high level of self-imposed danger and pain without harming others, and staged for a collective cause) has increased.
This study focuses on the question of changing protest repertoires of labor contention in neoliberal Korea and asks what explains the change from traditional to extreme repertoires in labor movements in times of institutionalized democracy and capitalist affluence. Protest repertoires are an important conceptual building block in social movement scholarship as they represent “historically created arrays of claim-making performances” (Tilly 2006: vii). Although the concept of protest repertoires is important in understanding the political and cultural manifestation of social movements, the changing and innovative character of protest repertoires is under-theorized. Scholars emphasized that massive social and structural transformations, such as industrialization, urbanization, the building of nation-states, give birth to renovations in prevalent protest forms (Tilly 2006, Traugott 2010). This study suggests a move beyond and beneath these structural arguments for protest repertoire change and instead argues the power relations and interactions among state institutions, corporations, and labor affect why an how resisting workers adopt new forms of protest methods.
This study builds its arguments based on protest repertoire data collected and coded from newspaper reports between 1999 and 2019 as well as interviews conducted with labor activists and union organizers.

Author

• Yoonkyung Lee, University of Toronto